All,

I'm having strange problems with an external hard drive I own. I have two partitions (sda1 31GB FAT32 and sda3 XFS; drive is 500GB). When I plug it in, Xfce sees it and shows their icons on the desktop. Normally, right-clicking to mount and/or directly opening works fine. However, tonight I tried using vobcopy while in /media/disk (the XFS partition) as root, and root could not write to /media/disk/Movies/. However, I know it's not vobcopy because, as a normal users, vobcopy from the user's Desktop works fine. The DVD mount and unmounts fine.

So neither the user nor root can write to the XFS partition. That's odd since it's owned by the user, and root should have no restrictions. I checked mount and it was mounted rw (although hal was set up as a mount option in the output of "mount").

I saw there was some sort of helper=hal or whatever in the mount options of the partition. When I remounted the disk in place (basically to eliminate hal from the equation: mount /dev/sda3 /media/disk -t xfs -o remount,rw) the user could once again copy files. This is odd because the entire XFS partition is owned by robert:users and chmod 700: it should've worked previously.

And even then, sometimes it doesn't work at all: the device won't let me use it that way.

Since I'm a HAL and UDEV newbie, what's the most elegant way to fix this problem? I read /usr/doc/hal*/*/* but to no avail. Thanks!

It seems it could be related to vobcopy since even when I specify the output directory, it converts spaces in the directory names to underscores....

Greetings, TwinReverb.

I must be honest: I do not see the point why you ought to set permissions to 700.

I should at least try to set permissions to 770 by the time the device is mounted (as options), as the owner can write to the XFS partition, allowing any user belonging to the group "users" to mount, ls, read and write.

Setting the "users" option on fstab will allow any user to mount and umount it at will. In a business network that would be a terribly bad idea, though.

If there is some other user and you would like not to grant him/her access to the device, just create a new group, assign the device to it (again as options) and give it permission to do it all at mount time (always as options).

Regards.

Well chmod 700 because i want it only readable by that user (and obviously root). That shouldn't prevent root from being able to write to it, as root is as if you are the OS itself.

The problem I still get is when hal wants to use the drive. It gives me errors when hal is loaded as the helper. I usually end up having to (once per session) remount without that option, then magically everything works.

EDIT: fwiw going "oldschool" with /etc/fstab and no udev or hal works fine, but the problem is with the fstab lines commented out and using udev and hal (i.e. stock slackware) they don't honor unix permissions. I think this is one of those feature requests for hal and/or udev that they can be told "if it's a USB drive bigger than 16GB, it's an external hard drive", etc.

Much less you can use any FS you want on a USB stick (well, on most), so they should be autodetecting, not assuming mount options for vfat. Some people might be using a chroot environment on their external USB hard drives, for example.

I had to get it to mount by putting:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/hd auto noauto,users,rw 0 0

in the fstab.

After that I just [mount /dev/sda1] and it mounted.

Using different distros, suse, ubuntu, etc I had different results but using the mount with the proper drive in fstab always worked.

in ubuntu it came up as /dev/sda4, for whatever reason, so I put /dev/sda4 in the fstabe and had no problem mounting the usb drive.

By the way, I purchased a ide to usb cable and use it all the time with laptop drives and desktop drives. Haven't gotten it to work with a Cdrom drive yet.

I'm looking for help with compiling audacity. I'm using slack 12.1 and I keep getting the error epact not enabled when I do ./configure.

I've installed libepact but that doesn't seem to help.

Any help would be appreciated.

Rexrino

What does this question have to do with the topic of this thread which is "Problems with USB External Hard Drive on Slackware 12.1"?

Please open your own new thread for this question.

Eric